A Statement on Bahá'u'lláh

Chapter 14

The Covenant of God
with Humankind

In June 1877,
Bahá'u'lláh at last emerged from the strict
confinement of the prison-city of ‘Akká, and moved
with His family to "Mazra'ih", a small
estate a few miles north of the city.106 As had been predicted in His statement to the
Turkish government, Sultán ‘Abdu'l-‘Azíz
had been overthrown and assassinated in a palace coup,
and gusts from the winds of political change sweeping the
world were beginning to invade even the shuttered
precincts of the Ottoman imperial system. After a brief two-year stay at
Mazra'ih, Bahá'u'lláh moved to
"Bahjí", a large mansion surrounded by
gardens, which His son ‘Abdu'l-Bahá had rented
for Him and the members of His extended family.107 The remaining twelve years of His life were
devoted to His writings on a wide range of spiritual and
social issues, and to receiving a stream of Bahá'í
pilgrims who made their way, with great difficulty, from
Persia and other lands.

Throughout
the Near and Middle East the nucleus of a community life
was beginning to take shape among those who had accepted
His message. For its
guidance, Bahá'u'lláh had revealed a system
of laws and institutions designed to give practical
effect to the principles in His writings.108 Authority was vested in councils democratically
elected by the whole community, provisions were made to
exclude the possibility of a clerical elite arising, and
principles of consultation and group decision making were
established.

At the heart
of this system was what Bahá'u'lláh termed a
"new Covenant" between God and humankind. The
distinguishing feature of humanity's coming of age
is that, for the first time in its history, the entire
human race is consciously involved, however dimly, in the
awareness of its own oneness and of the earth as a single
homeland. This awakening opens the way to a new
relationship between God and humankind. As the peoples of
the world embrace the spiritual authority inherent in the
guidance of the Revelation of God for this age,
Bahá'u'lláh said, they will find in
themselves a moral empowerment which human effort alone
has proven incapable of generating. "A new race of men"109 will emerge as the result of this relationship,
and the work of building a global civilization will
begin. The mission of the Bahá'í community was to
demonstrate the efficacy of this Covenant in healing the
ills that divide the human race.

Bahá'u'lláh died at Bahjí on May 29,
1892, in His seventy-fifth year. At the time of His
passing, the cause entrusted to Him forty years earlier
in the darkness of Teheran's Black Pit was poised to
break free of the Islamic lands where it had taken shape,
and to establish itself first across America and Europe
and then throughout the world. In doing so, it would
itself become a vindication of the promise of the new
Covenant between God and humankind. For alone of all the
world's independent religions, the Bahá'í
Faith and its community of believers were to pass
successfully through the critical first century of their
existence with their unity firmly intact, undamaged by
the age-old blight of schism and faction. Their
experience offers compelling evidence for
Bahá'u'lláh's assurance that the human
race, in all its diversity, can learn to live and work as
one people, in a common global homeland.

Just two
years before His death, Bahá'u'lláh received
at Bahjí one of the few Westerners to meet Him, and the
only one to leave a written account of the experience.
The visitor was Edward Granville Browne, a rising young
orientalist from Cambridge University, whose attention
had originally been attracted by the dramatic history of
the Báb and His heroic band of followers. Of his meeting
with Bahá'u'lláh, Browne wrote:

Though I dimly suspected
whither I was going and whom I was to behold (for no
distinct intimation had been given to me), a second
or two elapsed ere, with a throb of wonder and awe, I
became definitely conscious that the room was not
untenanted. In the corner where the divan met the
wall sat a wondrous and venerable figure... The face of him on whom I gazed I can never
forget, though I cannot describe it. Those piercing
eyes seemed to read one's very soul; power and
authority sat on that ample brow... No need to ask in
whose presence I stood, as I bowed myself before one
who is the object of a devotion and love which kings
might envy and emperors sigh for in vain! A mild
dignified voice bade me be seated, and then
continued: — "Praise be to God that
thou hast attained!...Thou hast come to see a
prisoner and an exile...We desire but the good of the
world and the happiness of the nations; yet they deem
us a stirrer up of strife and sedition worthy of
bondage and banishment...That all nations should
become one in faith and all men as brothers; that the
bonds of affection and unity between the sons of men
should be strengthened; that diversity of religion
should cease, and differences of race be annulled
— what harm is there in this?...Yet so it shall
be; these fruitless strifes, these ruinous wars shall
pass away, and the ‘Most great Peace' shall
come..."110